How to Evaluate Your Website's Keyword Density

Using keywords on a web page helps the search engines understand what your pages are about and helps people who are searching for your information find you with a search. Using good keywords is one of the cardinal principles of search engine optimization. This article explains an online tool that will help you analyze keyword density.

Difficulty:

Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• A web browser

1. Place keywords naturally on your web page using titles, headings, file names, URLs and within the paragraphs of a page. When checking on your keyword density, try to keep your keyword load at less than 7 percent of the total words on the page. Anything over 10 percent may set off alarms in search engines and actually hurt your search engine results.

2. Go to the Ranks website to utilize their Keyword Density Analyzer tool. (See Resources below for link.)

3. The Ranks Form

   Fill in the form with the URL you want to analyze and list the keywords you are interested in checking.

4. Results are exhaustive. You learn about keywords in titles, meta elements, alt text, headings, links, even bold and italic text. You get a percentage breakdown for the keywords in each of those categories, plus a percentage of keyword repeats as part of the entire page.

5. The results also include a display as a tag cloud which shows you every term on your page in a size relative to its frequency of use.

6. The results include keywords found with density between 2.0 percent to 15.0 percent, even if you didn't put them in the form when you began the analysis.

Tips & Warnings

• Keyword stuffing (adding keywords in hidden ways or hundreds of times in a context that humans wouldn't want to read) is considered a dirty trick by the search engines. That's why you don't want to go above a natural, human readable context of about 10 percent with keywords.

Resources

• Ranks Keyword Density Analyzer